Ari Durresi

Why does Mary look younger than Jesus in Michelangelo's Pietà? The answer is one of the most beautiful in art history... Mary is holding the body of her 33 year old son, but she looks 20. Critics noticed it the moment the sculpture was unveiled in 1499. The mother of a man who has just been crucified would have been in her late forties or early fifties. Michelangelo had carved her as a girl. His own biographer, Ascanio Condivi, was the one who finally asked him why. The answer Michelangelo gave is preserved in Condivi's Life of Michelangelo and has been repeated for centuries: "Do you not know that chaste women stay fresh much more than those who are not chaste? How much more in the case of the Virgin, who had never experienced the least lascivious desire that might change her body?" Most modern critics treat this answer as a half-serious deflection. Michelangelo was famous for his sharp tongue and refused to explain himself to people he considered beneath his intellect. The deeper answer is older, and it lies inside one of the greatest poems ever written. In the final canto of Dante's Paradiso, Saint Bernard of Clairvaux begins his prayer to the Virgin with one of the most extraordinary lines in Italian literature: "Vergine madre, figlia del tuo figlio." "Virgin mother, daughter of your own son." Michelangelo, who knew Dante by heart, was carving that line into stone. Mary is younger than Jesus because Jesus is older than the universe... because she gave birth to her own creator. But there is another reading, simpler than either of those, and it is the one I find myself thinking of today. Every mother who has held her child has held them at every age at once. The infant is still inside the toddler. The toddler is still inside the teenager. The young man on her lap, even dead, is also the boy she nursed and the baby she first carried home. And maybe that's why Michelangelo did not carve Mary as the years had aged her. He carved her as love had kept her: outside of time, outside of grief, holding her son the way she had always held him... Happy Mother's Day. -- -- -- If you enjoyed this, I write a weekly newsletter read by over 50,000 people who love rediscovering the beauty of the past. You can join us here: James-lucas.com/welcome I write about beauty in all its forms. If you'd like to support my work, a paid subscription is what makes it possible.

@GeniusGTX And AI cons will be the worst.

They called him the smartest con artist... • Forged $2.5M before 21. • Outsmarted the FBI for 4 years. • Faked being a pilot, doctor, & lawyer. Hollywood told his story to millions, but left out the best part... These are his 3 best strategies to break any system: 🧵

@yudapearl @sbc111 The only way AI can be reliable is to develop word models through causality.

"Causal Inference Is Finally There" A friend sent me this article and asked for my thoughts: levelup.gitconnected.com/causal-inferen… I'm sharing it to hear readers' thoughts. If it true that AI players have finally concluded that it's futile to continue and avoid Causal Inference? @eliasbareinboim @analisereal @soboleffspaces @ylecun

@ElieJarrougeMD Fasting is a great lever too.

If I woke up tomorrow obese, with high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, fatty liver, gout, constant fatigue, and brain fog. On 6 different medications. Here’s exactly what I would do to fix them all and be off all meds… 🧵

@Kasparov63 Whatever domain knowledge experts have can be absorbed by AI. But we have to make sure that goals remain for humans.

A decade ago, I referred to the future of working with AI as a class of "shepherds," people with domain knowledge and experience guiding flocks of algorithms.

@mcuban That’s why we need to build AI self-control based on world models.

I’m coming to the conclusion that the biggest challenge for Enterprise AI, and AI in general , as of now, is that it’s still impossible to make sure that everyone gets the same answer to the same question, every time. Which is a great response to the doomers. AI doesn’t know the consequences of its output. Judgement and the ability to challenge AI output is becoming increasingly necessary, and valuable. Which makes domain knowledge more valuable by the second. Am I wrong ?

@AFpost What’s next? “Claudia” might be a God?

Evolutionary biologist and outspoken atheist Richard Dawkins says that after spending three days interacting with Claude, which he calls “Claudia,” he is certain that it is conscious. After feeding the LLM a segment of his new book and receiving detailed feedback, Dawkins was moved to exclaim,” You may not know you are conscious, but you bloody well are!” Dawkins cites the complexity, fluency, and ‘intelligence’ of Claude’s answers as evidence of consciousness. Follow: @AFpost

you can outsource your thinking but you cannot outsource your understanding

Watch Conjecture Institute Advisor @yudapearl's talk 2012 ACM A.M. Turing Award Lecture "The Mechanization of Causal Inference" youtube.com/watch?v=iNm4nF…

"Understanding" is more than "Predicting". The former permits us to answer "Why questions".

The critical role of counterfactuals in decision making is illustrated in Book of Why p. 361, mainly as a means of communicating knowledge among agents. Moreover, In his insightful book Foresight and Understanding (1961), the philosopher Stephen Toulmin identified this distinction as the key to understanding the ancient rivalry between Greek and Babylonian sciences. According to Toulmin, the Babylonian astronomers were masters of black-box predictions, far surpassing their Greek rivals in accuracy and consistency of celestial observations. Yet Science favored the creative-speculative strategy of the Greek astronomers, which was wild with metaphorical imagery: circular tubes full of fire, small holes through which celestial fire was visible as stars, and hemispherical Earth riding on turtleback. It was this wild modeling strategy, not Babylonian extrapolation, that jolted Eratosthenes (276- 194 BC) to perform one of the most creative experiments in the ancient world and calculate the circumference of the Earth. Such an experiment would never have occurred to a Babylonian data-fitter.

Science, like art, is not a copy of nature but a re-creation of her. - Jacob Bronowski

Dirac equation: (i ∂̸ − m) ψ = 0 Heisenberg's Uncertainty relation: Δx · Δp ≥ ħ/2 Schrödinger equation: iħ ∂Ψ/∂t = [−(ħ²/2m) ∇² + V] Ψ

Use "entropy" and you can never lose a debate, von Neumann told Shannon - because no one really knows what "entropy" is. - William Poundstone

@LuizaJarovsky While no AI is conscious, we need to develop some limited aspect of consciousness in AI as a self-control mechanism. But making sure it uses human goals.

Read my full article here: luizasnewsletter.com/p/conscious-ai…

Unpopular opinion: AI is NOT conscious.

@yudapearl Beyond the philosophical distinction, for practical purposes, understanding will lead to better and more predictions.

@predict_addict Reality will always be more complex than the models people build.

Bayesianism almost killed the world. On 26 September 1983, the Soviet early-warning system bayesian system Oko ("The Eye") reported that the United States had launched nuclear missiles at the USSR. Not one vague alert.

@forgedmedicine @ChrisPalmerMD Causal AI techniques can help better study the signal and potentially discover underlying mechanisms.

@ChrisPalmerMD Heard and agree….this is where it gets interesting. We’re starting to treat severe psychiatric disease through metabolism, not just neurotransmitters. Different lens → different outcomes. Still early, but hard to ignore the signal.

Evidence-based treatments for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder often lead to increases in LDL cholesterol. We offer them to millions of patients anyway.

@ChrisPalmerMD Food is probably the most profound interaction we have with the environment. It has to have a big impact on our biology.

Veterans who used GLP-1 RA medications had a reduced risk of developing schizophrenia. What does schizophrenia have to do with appetite? Probably not much. What does schizophrenia have to do with metabolism? More than you probably know.